“Maybe I’m the one who’s mad, then. Because I’ve been stuck around this island my entire life and nothing interesting has ever happened. Now here you are.”
“Here I go. That’s my cue to say good night.”
Before he could say anything she couldn’t be sure he meant, Barrie let herself into the house, leaving him standing on the step looking almost as confused as she felt. Maybe that made her a coward, but she needed time to think. Falling for a guy was hard enough. She didn’t need extra complications to make her doubt herself. She stood for a minute, leaning back against the door, shoring up her strength. Then she headed into the kitchen.
She had hoped it would be deserted, but Pru stood at the counter slicing the crusts off a loaf of thin, white sandwich bread. Her eyes went straight to the wind-tangled mess of Barrie’s hair. “Is everything all right, sugar? I was getting worried. You were gone so long.”
“Eight and I went to the beach to talk after the play was over.” Barrie washed her hands and got another knife and a cutting board from the cabinet. After stacking eight slices of bread on top of one another, she took pleasure in hacking off the crusts. She looked up to catch Pru watching her with the same expectant kind of silence Mark had always used to get her to talk. Go figure. Maybe there was some sort of secret parental interrogation manual. She stacked more bread and guillotined the crusts.
Pru cleared her throat. “How was Cassie’s play?”
“Fantastic,” Barrie said brightly. “They did this thing where they projected the scenery behind the stage, and Cassie was excellent.”
Pru waited another couple beats, then prompted: “So you didn’t have any trouble?”
Barrie reached for another stack of bread.
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look like a girl who had a good night.” Pru came over and put her hand over Barrie’s. “Is it Eight, honey, or did something happen at the play? Wyatt wasn’t there, was he?”
Barrie felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the room, and she searched for a way to answer without resorting to an ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ “Wyatt was there, but it wasn’t . . . Oh, who am I kidding? He was awful.”
Pru went still. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“N-no.” Barrie hated the catch in her voice. “No. Not me,” she said more firmly.
After a moment of continued stillness, Pru got a glass and poured herself a shot of brandy from a bottle in the cupboard. Then she went and sat down at the table. “All right. I’m ready now,” she said. “Tell me all about Wyatt.”
And what was the point of keeping quiet? By tomorrow Eight would have told Seven everything.
Barrie put down the knife and went to sit in the chair across from Pru. “He really was horrible,” she said, resting her elbows on the table. “He accused me of going over there so I could look down on them, and he told me I was nosy, just like Lula. I don’t even know what made him so mad. He seemed nice enough last night.”
“I wonder if something happened between him and Lula before she left. She did mention him in her letter.”
Barrie looked up sharply. “Like what kind of something?”
“Lord only knows.” Pru took another sip of brandy. “Lula was always liable to say whatever popped into her head. If she had her heart set on leaving with Wade, and Wyatt tried to stop them? I don’t know.” She set the glass down with a thump. “I should probably call Seven and ask him for help.”
“Help doing what? Nothing happened that a lawyer can fix. Anyway, I think Cassie calmed Wyatt down.” Barrie wasn’t going to let anyone else fix her messes for her anymore. Not Eight, not Pru, and certainly not Seven.
Pru gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted to be friends with the girls. It’s a shame that won’t work out.”
It had to, though. Barrie owed Cassie that much. She had to make Pru understand.
“It has nothing to do with our being friends. None of this is Cassie’s fault—and Sydney seems genuinely sweet. I feel really bad for them. Wyatt hit Cassie, right in front of us. In front of her sister.”
Pru rose, wiped her hands on her apron, and went back to the counter before she said anything. “Was Cassie all right?”
“More embarrassed than hurt, I think. But I can’t help wondering how often that happens.” Barrie’s throat knotted. “You see why I can’t not be friends with them, right?” She glanced at Pru. “What kind of person would I be if I walked away when Cassie and Sydney were nice and it was only Wyatt who was horrible?”
Pru gazed back at the brandy she’d left on the table as if she were contemplating drowning in it. She picked up a block of cream cheese instead and opened it meticulously. “So let me make sure I have this right. You’re saying I should let you be friends with Cassie because you know her father is violent, even though I thought it was a bad idea when we only suspected he was violent.”
“Well, if you’re going to put it that way . . .” Barrie blew out a breath and smiled. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying.”
Pru dumped the cream cheese into a bowl with an emphatic splat. “Just promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise you won’t go anywhere near Wyatt. Or anywhere he might show up. I’ll talk to Seven, too, and we’ll see if there’s anything he can do.”
“Cassie begged me not to call the police. I think that would make it worse for her.” Barrie crossed the counter and picked up a peeled cucumber from the counter, and started cutting it into nearly transparent slices. Her burst of energy seemed to be draining from her.
“None of this is easy, is it?” Pru came over and kissed her on the cheek. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing. It’s not always obvious what that is.”
Smiling sadly, she turned back to the counter and began combining cream cheese, mayonnaise, dill, salt, and pepper together into a cream. Barrie finished slicing the cucumbers and put them into a bowl with salt and lemon juice.
“We’ll leave the assembly for tomorrow,” Pru said. “Otherwise the bread gets soggy.” She covered the plates and bowls in plastic wrap and stored them all in the refrigerator, then hung her apron on the hook in the butler’s pantry. “There. That went faster with your help, even with our conversation.”
“Thanks for not being mad, Aunt Pru.”
Pru’s eyebrows rose. “Why would I be mad at you?”
They locked the house together and went upstairs. The dim light of the corridor sharpened the hollows of Pru’s face, making her look much older, as if Barrie’s arrival had woken her from a magical sleep and the years had caught up to her. Barrie felt a twinge of guilt for making her aunt worry. Then the guilt was swallowed by rage—at the circumstances, at Wyatt, at Lula, at Cassie, and most of all at herself for feeling guilty.
Too many emotions were all crammed inside her. That and the pressure from the empty wing made her feel like she was going to burst as she neared the top of the stairs. She couldn’t control Wyatt’s violent temper, or Eight’s leaving, or that Mark was dying. Whatever was lost down the dark corridor, though, and in the library or anywhere else in the house, that much she could fix. Pru didn’t need to know.
She paused outside her door. “Good night, Aunt Pru.”
“Sleep well, sweetheart.” Pru gave her a quick kiss before continuing to her own room at the end of the hall.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Barrie pulled on clean pajama shorts and a thick pair of fuzzy socks, but she was too restless to read or sketch, let alone to sleep. Leaning on the balcony railing, she let the night sounds blanket her thoughts until a movement upstairs at Beaufort Hall claimed her attention. The distance couldn’t disguise the silhouette of Eight’s body in the window. He always moved as if he knew exactly where he was going. Barrie needed more of that.
It wasn’t quite midnight yet. She peeked into the hallway. No light seeped under Pru’s door, and there was no sound when she laid her ear against the wood. She crept toward the staircase. Ev
ery creak and groan of the time-warped floorboards made her wince and pause, and she let out a sigh when she reached the top of the steps. Then it occurred to her that she couldn’t turn on the light in the corridor to the empty wing, not without the risk of Pru seeing it through the crack beneath her door. She would have to save that section of the house for daylight. In the meantime, there was still the library.
Even clean and exorcised, Emmett’s sanctum was grim, as if it had absorbed the man’s personality over the years. Barrie already knew enough about her grandfather to know she was glad she had never met him.
His keys, surprisingly, were in plain sight in the top-right drawer of the desk. There were eight on the ring, three of them too large and ornate. Four were too small. Barrie went straight to an old-fashioned brass key that looked about the right size to fit the bottom drawer. The lock snicked open on the first try, but the drawer was empty.
That made no sense. The finding pull clearly came from that drawer, and the sense of loss was stronger now that Barrie had it open. She leaned forward in the desk chair, sliding her fingertips across the smooth sides and top of the empty recess, probing until a pinky-size section released.
A panel at the back of the drawer popped open. Barrie reached inside the cavity, half-expecting to feel spiders skittering up her arm or the cold steel of a loaded gun. Something as unpleasant as Emmett himself. Instead paper crackled in her grasp, and she pried a bundle of yellowed envelopes out of the drawer. They were held together by an ancient rubber band that broke into several pieces as soon as she touched it.
Frowning, she stared at the envelope on top. It was five years old and addressed to Pru in Lula’s familiar combination of flamboyance and pain-racked, shaking script. One by one, Barrie flipped through every envelope, through eleven years of postmarks, eleven years of letters addressed either to Pru or to Emmett. All of them had been neatly sliced open across the top by a letter opener or a sharpened knife.
The envelope on the very bottom had been mailed months after the fire, the same month Lula had finally been released from the hospital. Every letter had a return address.
Barrie felt like the room was spinning around her, faster and faster, and she didn’t know how to make it stop. Someone—Barrie’s grandfather?—had known exactly where Lula had been all along. And who else could it have been, aside from Emmett? It was his library, his locked drawer. Barrie couldn’t imagine Pru ignoring Lula or pretending Lula were dead if she knew it wasn’t true.
Pru had never seen these letters. She hadn’t known her twin was alive, because Emmett had hidden that knowledge from her, the same way he had hidden it from everyone else on Watson Island.
What kind of father did that?
Barrie’s hands shook. The yellowed paper rasped as she pulled the oldest letter from the envelope.
Daddy,
I understand what you said, and I’m not questioning. I’m not accusing. I haven’t told a soul, I swear. I never will, because I’m a Watson as much as you are. There’s also Barrie to think of now. She looks exactly like me. Like I used to look. I didn’t realize how important family was until the first time she looked up at me from her bassinet. The doctors say I should be able to hold her soon. Maybe I will.
You can’t mean it about not letting me come home. Tell everyone the funeral was a mistake. Tell them you didn’t know I survived. Yes, it might be safer if Wyatt thinks I’m dead, but it’s killing me to be away from Watson’s Landing anyway. There are medical bills, too, and I have at least three surgeries left to go. How am I supposed to get through that and manage to take care of a baby?
Don’t keep hanging up on me. Please! Please? Let me talk to you, or at least to Pru or Mama. You have to help me.
The letter wasn’t signed or dated. Barrie dropped it onto the table and flipped through all the postmarks again, hoping the letters were simply out of sequence and she would find the first part of whatever discussion Lula had already had with Emmett mixed in somewhere. But the letter she had read was the oldest correspondence. She picked up the next one and pulled it from the envelope with fingers that felt too clumsy. This one was even shorter.
Daddy,
Thank you for the money and instructions. No, I can’t prove Wyatt was here, but if you would just tell the police on Watson Island, I’m sure they could find a reason to arrest him. Then maybe the police here would believe me, and I could finally come home. If you won’t do that, at least let Pru come to me. You know how it hurts to be away. I’m in too much pain to bear it. Please! You have my promise. I swear I will keep your secret. What more do you want from me?
Barrie’s throat burned as she tried to swallow her rage and frustration. No signature again, and no real information. What secret? And what kind of secret would have anything to do with Wyatt?
She rammed the letter back into the envelope and threw it onto the desk as the gong of the grandfather clock sounded in the hall. Her blood quickened with each hour it counted.
Midnight.
Already flames lit the trees, and the sky outside the library window was brightening. The fire called to Barrie, drew her to her feet. She gripped the top of the chair and told herself to be sensible, but a moment later she was hurrying down the corridor into the kitchen, tearing the chain off the jamb again in her rush. In the night air, the pull grew stronger, more compelling.
She raced across the terrace and down the steps. The gravel and shells on the path bit through her socks, tore into her skin. But the Fire Carrier had reached the river already, and Barrie’s feet swept her forward as if she couldn’t stop. She entered the maze and kept running, approaching the fountain and the point where the path drew closest to the trees.
The woods had a pull of their own. Just past the fountain, the competing sense of loss hit her like a fist and slowed her long enough for sanity to intervene. She stopped to rub her head, to catch her breath.
What was she doing? She hated stupid horror movies where the characters did things like this. In what universe was it a good idea to be out here at midnight? Alone? Chasing after a ghost—worse, the ghost of a witch? Except she felt the Fire Carrier wanting—needing—something from her.
Sure he did. Her skin maybe. Wasn’t that one of those voodoo legends? That dead things could steal a person’s skin?
At the farthest edge of the marsh grass, the shadowy form of the Fire Carrier bent low over the water, fire spilling from his arms across the river. He hadn’t seen her yet.
He straightened. Any moment he would turn and catch her watching, the way he had every night at this part of the ceremony. Barrie backed toward the house. But she tripped over something—the ceramic bowl Pru had left out beside the fountain. It clattered against the stone. She fell, and caught herself on her hands, slicing the heels of her palms.
The Fire Carrier spun toward her. His dark eyes searched for her, eyes she felt more than saw.
She made herself stand up. For Pete’s sake, all she needed to do was start screeching as she ran away, and she would qualify as the heroine of some horrible B movie. The kind who inevitably died.
The Fire Carrier watched her, neither threatening nor advancing. Barrie’s hands stung where she had cut them, and they were sticky and caked with grit. She rinsed them in the fountain.
In the glow of the river fire and the moon, her blood sent red ribbons unfurling in the water. Ribbons that eddied in the current and sank slowly toward the bottom.
Barrie’s head swam. The edges of her vision blurred. The fountain grumbled, gurgled, then flowed faster and higher, as if more pressure had rushed into the pipes.
Everything around her surged with intensity. The babble of the fountain, the susurrus of the river, the crackle of the fire, the screech of frogs and insects—they were all too loud. The air throbbed with a war-drum chant, words Barrie couldn’t understand, and sage-scented smoke assaulted her nose, mixing with the loamy earth and the briny tannin odor of the river. All around, the night glittered as if she were looking at
it through a prism. Even the knee-high shadows darting around her were clearly human-shaped. Their eyes left fiery contrails of orange behind them.
Fiery eyes. Wasn’t that what Mary had said?
Barrie reeled from the onslaught of noise and scent and light. She felt, too, as if something watched her. Not the Fire Carrier. He still stood like a rock in the river, the fire and the current eddying around him. He was clearer than he had been, almost solid enough to be a living man. Beneath the mask of war paint, his features were proud and somber, flickering in the light of the flames he held in his arms. But as Barrie met his eyes, he raised his hand and pointed behind her at the fountain.
Reluctantly Barrie turned. The movement itself took a hundred years, long enough for the hair on her arms and the back of her neck to rise, long enough for all the air to squeeze out of her lungs.
From the top basin of the three-tiered fountain, a figure stared back at her. Not a person. Another spirit of some kind, a woman with translucent hair cascading around shoulders that melted into water drops and the moonlit dark of night. Her fingers were rivulets pouring into the basin, her legs and hips and torso a streaming column of water. She watched Barrie with ancient eyes, evaluating her. Judging. Yes, that was the word. Barrie felt she was being judged.
“W-what do you want?” Barrie croaked.
The voice that answered was a whisper of water and a breath of wind. It came from inside Barrie’s mind and from everywhere around her. “You have given blood,” it seemed to say.
“Given?” Barrie swayed on her feet. She grabbed the edge of the fountain to keep from falling.
“We accept the binding.”
The pronouncement echoed. Before it had fully faded, the woman collapsed in a froth of water. Then the water calmed, and the fountain was only a fountain again.
Had the woman been there at all? Barrie wanted to believe the spirit had been an overdose of emotion or imagination, but she’d spent days wishing Lula’s death and Mark’s announcement had been a nightmare from which she could wake. Wishes didn’t come true. Not for her.
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